Building a business that involves acquiring thousands of small merchants as customers and then driving mass quantities of quality leads to those merchants is one of the toughest challenges in the local space. HomeAdvisor is one of a relatively few companies out there that…
The energy in the SMB space is moving away from the narrow notion of selling advertising products for lead generation to provisioning a much wider range of marketing services. These solutions are focused not just on acquiring customers, but also…
Homejoy, the San Francisco-based on-demand home cleaning startup announced it will shut down on July 31st, leaving customers who have already paid for services to request refunds while Google has swooped in to hire the company's development team for its…
What is the state of the art in deep linking and app interoperability? How are mobile ads becoming more actionable? and how is the on-demand economy playing out with household items? These are a few topics we tackled this week, aggregated…
Groupon today announced it would join the online food delivery space, acquiring Baltimore-based OrderUp, which has O&O and affiliated delivery service in 40 markets. Most of the markets are college towns, which is a strongpoint for food delivery. As Crain’s…
After giving the afternoon keynote at BIA/Kelsey NOW, MyTime CEO Ethan Anderson answered questions for our cameras about the changing nature of work and customer relationships (full video embedded below). "Consumers have the new expectation that when they want something,…
SMB scheduling and operations platform MyTime is bringing the local On-Demand economy (LODE) to established SMBs, as opposed to the "gig economy" where the discussion usually lies. We discussed with CEO Ethan Anderson during a Keynote at BIA/Kelsey NOW (video below).…
Light Reaction and Marchex today pushed the ball forward on call monetization by announcing M-Call, a tool for mobile publishers to drive phone calls directly from mobile ads. It's being launched in partnership by Light Reaction and Xaxis, both divisions of GroupM. Marchex will power…
In our ongoing coverage of call monetization, one benefit is the ability to influence large considered purchases. As we've mentioned, the need to talk to a human isn't going away even in a digital era. That's especially true for big…
Chicago-based Centro, which helps provide targeted ad solutions to 13,000 publishers -- 4,000 at any given time -- says it is refocusing on providing publishers with complete Demand Side solutions that integrate first party data targeting, hyperlocal mobile tools, digital extensions…
Publication of the BIA/Kelsey Local Media Watch newsletter will take a week off, as our editors enjoy some well-deserved downtime. Newsletter publication will resume next Thursday. Meanwhile, we invite you to enjoy some favorite stories from the past few weeks.…
It’s late, you’ve returned to your car after an evening ballgame to find the tire is flat. What do you do? With parking place reservation app ParkWhiz, a Chicago-based iOS and Android developer, the answer is now embedded in the same app you used to find and book the parking spot. The company has partnered with Urgent.ly, which provides roadside assistance to drivers, to offer Urgent.ly services in its app, at the touch of a button. ParkWhiz app users get immediate help and the company shares part of the revenue generated by Urgent.ly for the referral.
BIA/Kelsey has released its 2015 Insights into Local Advertising report for the Financial Vertical. The report provides BIA/Kelsey’s estimates of marketing and advertising spend in each of the major segments of the Financial Services industry.
One important takeaway is that financial services are undergoing rapid transformation due to automation, innovation in financial technology and changing consumer preferences that favor smaller more service-oriented banks.
The last player standing in the hyperlocal neighbor wars might be considered NextDoor, which has raised over $210 million from several major VCs on the basis of converting a mountain of neighborhoods and neighbors to targeted advertising dollars. We’d like…
Rocks Digital 2015 was held June 29-30 in Dallas, Texas. This year's digital marketing conference brought two days education, information and resources to business owners, digital marketing agencies and enterprise level service providers. The Rocks Digital conference is the brain child…
What are the tactics that are working and not working in the explosive call analytics space? And what is the role of relationships and community in local on demand services (LODE)? These are a few topics we tackled this week,…
One of the emerging mobile use cases is sharing multimedia through social graphs. We're talking pictures over Instagram, location check-ins over Facebook, and video snaps over Snapchat. It's especially prevalent among increasingly buying-empowered millennials. The technology macro-environment is also driving…
In the increasingly competitive local on demand economy (LODE), building relationships and lifestyle should come before traditional "selling." This according to Porch VP of Marketing Joanna Lord, who kicked off BIA/Kelsey NOW in what many believed to be the highlight…
Two well-known players in SMB marketing services today announced a partnership to integrate their platforms to provide end-to-end customer acquisition/retention services for SMBs. The new partners are WordStream, a major SEM and search services provider (and Google Premier SMB Partner), and…
What are the implications behind BIA/Kelsey's new calls forecast data? What's behind YP's decision to carve out print? And why did eBay sell off its Craigslist stake? These are a few topics we tackled this week, aggregated into the Local…